Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics (review)

In this concise and clear assessment of contemporary political theory, Talisse reintroduces the language of truth into our democratic practices. The truth that Talisse is interested in, as the subtitle of the book suggests, is not the truth of the dogmatist but that of the Peircean—that is, the regulative ideal that guides the fallible investigations of the community of inquirers. This turn toward critical realism and the revision of politics on forthrightly epistemological terms, Talisse argues persuasively, is a main chance to avoid the intractable dilemma between unity and diversity into which contemporary liberal democracy has fallen.

This is a book to be read with profit by professor, student, and layperson alike. Talisse skillfully summarizes debates that fill shelves of books, providing accounts that not only are conceptually clear but also frame the debate for further investigation. Given his claim to the critical realist or deliberativist label (10), it should be no surprise that Talisse has produced a book that engenders thought more than it offers clinching arguments for his position (98). The virtue of Democracy After Liberalism is that it successfully clarifies the positions and the stakes of contemporary debates in political philosophy. In the end, Talisse himself cannot be said to have offered more than one highly plausible and engaging resolution to the confusion of political ideas in which we live. This is no mean accomplishment, and Democracy After Liberalism makes for rewarding reading.

The majority of this refreshingly slim book is devoted to rehearsing the dilemma of liberal democracy. That dilemma is cast as one between unity and plurality, theory and actuality. The charge is that liberalism—understood as a comprehensive theory of personhood, morality, and politics—is not viable in an environment of ideological diversity, tolerance, and privacy. Each of these conditions is a result of liberalism. In a word, liberalism gives rise to social and ideological pluralism that undermines the very idea of liberalism as a unified way of life. Talisse's working definition of liberalism is borrowed from Martha Nussbaum:

Liberalism holds that the flourishing of human beings taken one by one is both analytically and normatively prior to the flourishing of the state or the nation or the religious group; analytically because such unities do not really efface the separate reality of individual lives; normatively because the recognition of that separateness is held to be a fundamental fact for ethics, which should recognize each separate entity as an end and not as a means to the ends of others.

(1999, 62)

Liberalism is a unity that necessarily undermines itself in that its organizing principles lead to the disorganization in which each individual charts his or her own course. This core tendency of liberalism—in which we all, as Williams Galston wrote, "go our own way" (2002, 58)—has been exacerbated by historical, demographic, and sociological trends that have eroded the relative cultural homogeneity in which liberalism arose and that for a time constrained the centrifugal forces of liberal democracy.

Talisse reviews the origins of this dilemma in the philosophies of Locke, Kant, and Mill and then surveys the current state of the dilemma in the contemporary controversies among liberals, communitarians, antifoundationalists, civic republicans, constructivists, pluralists, and proceduralists. In the course of doing so, Talisse provides wonderful précis of positions that can serve as useful frames for classroom discussion. Moreover Talisse takes care to note that the dilemma of liberalism is not just a problem for scholarly debate. He provides readers with substantial political and sociological matter to chew on in the course of describing why the failure of democratic theory brings with it real political and personal consequences. The privatization of public life; decreased participation in formal politics; ethnic, racial, and ideological conflict; general political ignorance—all of these empirical facts are part of the dilemma of liberalism.

While Democracy After Liberalism provides a broad review of the issues and the participants in the...